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by whiddershins 4854 days ago
hmm, I think some different, unrelated issues are getting conflated here.

- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank

- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes sense, right?

- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here about that stat?

- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as possible so you use their service.

- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction between advertising content and "normal" content.

- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that context.

1 comments

> - You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it still filters.

It also resets itself to Top Stories say, every day or so. I would say I am surprised that with all the engineering talent Facebook has they can't manage to remember this one setting I have made about 20 times, but I am not that naive.
Might be a bug on your end, I've been using recent stories for a very long time now (always seeing the same stuff on top posts got annoying) and never had to change it back to it.